This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life, by David Foster Wallace, Little, Brown, 144 pages, $16.99
Publisher Little, Brown hasn't let the grass grow under its corporate feet since the suicide of David Foster Wallace in September, 2008. This is Water , the first of (at least) two DFW posthumous releases, is a tiny booklet transcript of his commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College.
The speech is available in reliable samizdat form on the Internet, so whether you choose to buy this booklet will probably depend on your desire to add to your personal Wallace collection. If you do buy it, you may also choose to carry it around in your back pocket – it'll easily fit – as you go about your day. While the booklet is small in stature, the ideas contained therein are XL, and certainly worth daily reflection.
The booklet's core message – you should choose to override your solipsistic default setting (living as though you're the centre of the world) in favour of an enlarged, more generous life with other, similarly solipsistically bent featherless bipeds – is so important, and so much in need of continual reminding about (to override the hard-wired setting), that having the booklet handy in your back pocket just might be a good idea. Especially during universally frustrating moments: e.g. the dehumanizing grocery-checkout line and the withering commute surrounded by high-rise pickups that cut you off to get one Hummer's length ahead of you. The booklet's purpose is to help you contemplate your place in this culture with everybody else, and to remind you that you must choose to think more charitably when enduring petty frustrations.
Sagacious advice aside, I'm cynically hard-wired to see this booklet as nothing more than a crass money-maker hastily launched to capitalize on the attention garnered by Wallace's sudden and shocking death. That Little, Brown recently announced that it will also publish Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King , in the spring of 2010 galvanizes my cynicism. My initial thoughts were, why not just include this booklet as an appendix in the posthumous novel instead of bilking DFW-bereft readers for an already available speech? Or why not at least include an introduction from Michael Pietsch, Wallace's long-time editor, or some other DFW insider, and make it into a real book instead of a 3,700-word pamphlet? And do you really have to charge $17 for it?
The booklet's marketing is equally irritating. The speech is fragmented typographically into aphoristic statements of one to three sentences per page. The result of artificially breaking down the speech into phraselets not originally intended to stand alone is that the man's ideas are diminished (for example, “so let's get concrete” and “and so on”), and only emphasize the publisher's mannered typography – as though a commencement address could be transformed into philosophical brilliance via simple textual manipulation. It's frustrating to read, and the style won't resonate with savvy Wallace readers.
Why? Because Wallace himself was the master of meaningful textual fragmentation – always for a readerly payoff – and he would never have fragmented a text as a slick marketing ploy. His playing with texts (using complicated foot-and endnotes, intrusive editor's brackets and long, burly sentences) all served a purpose beyond the manipulation of the literary strategy itself: Connecting with the reader was paramount to him. That was one relationship he would not mess with. The publishers, through the pointless text fragmentation, are disingenuously implying that this is a work of profound, even mystical, philosophy, akin to the Tao Te Ching, say.
Yes, the booklet is astute for anyone about to confront workplace tedium, diminished career prospects and tarnished hopes – so, all of us – but it's not like every word has Jesus-like red-letter profundity. And calling the booklet a “witty and profound manifesto” on the back cover just adds to the embarrassing bombast that Wallace himself eschewed. What's ferociously ironic here is that Little, Brown has used Wallace's iron-clad integrity as a marketing tool for a Wallace book(let). It's just plain sad.
But this is my default setting. I'm trying to be more generous because Wallace had no hand in this booklet's production. He simply wrote a very good – though not brilliant – speech to help ease graduating students into unglamorous day-in, day-out adult life. And so I'm choosing to turn off the default cynicism here.
And choice is what this booklet is all about, let's recall. Wallace's greatness here is that he takes quotidian things we've all universally experienced and simply reminds us of them: that we are not the star of the show; that while other people are frequently repellent and odious to us, they are also paradoxically the tonic for our loneliness; and that attempting to live more generously and beyond our hot petty interests takes work – the real work of our lives, as it turns out. It's our choice.
Choosing to be more patient with the blowhard in the bookstore barking into his Bluetooth beside you while you're enjoying a quiet book browse takes a conscious choice not to be miffed, peeved or worse. All of these tiny, seemingly meaningless choices to think beyond ourselves add up to an aggregate of genuine empathic human action at the end of the eight-hour day. This choosing to see things beyond ourselves makes us less achingly lonely too. It helps us toward becoming fully realized human beings. But it takes work.
So choose.
Tim Jacobs is a nominee for the 2009 Journey Prize for his short story INRI. He wrote a haphazard doctoral dissertation on David Foster Wallace called The Eschatological Imagination.
